Climate By Numbers

Can a tech firm help farmers survive global warming?

David Friedberg says, “In parts of Kansas, farmers should simply not be growing corn.”Credit Illustration by Andrew Zbihly

It was nearly impossible to drive the back roads of southern Indiana this summer without being lulled into a trance by the monotonous perfection of the cornstalks. They lined every route, forming a canopy that stretched for miles, strong, straight, and taller than any Hoosier. In late August, the U.S. Department of Agriculture stated publicly what the growers had known for weeks: this year’s crop would almost certainly be the largest in American history.

A year ago, that kind of bounty would have seemed unimaginable. In 2012, drought struck nearly eighty per cent of the nation’s farmland, and the growing season was the hottest and driest in decades. Perhaps worse, over the past half century there has been a sharp, sustained increase in the number of what farmers call “toad stranglers”—days with more than three inches of rain. That kind of weather is death to corn and soybeans, the country’s biggest crops. Last year’s harvest was a catastrophe. “Just take a look at this,” Doug Theobald, who lives about an hour south of Indianapolis, said when I met him on his farm one morning this summer. Theobald and his family raise waxy corn, which is used for cornstarch and other thickeners. He handed me two snapshots of a cornfield. The first, taken on July 5, 2012, looked as if it had been lifted from a documentary about the Dust Bowl: withered gray stalks barely reached waist high. In the second photo, taken exactly one year later, verdant plants filled the frame. “Last year was the worst corn harvest in a century,” he said. “Barring a freak storm, our worst acre this year will bring in more corn than our best did last year. That has never happened before.”

Unpredictable weather is hardly rare, or new. For thousands of years, floods, droughts, tornadoes, heat waves, and early frosts have been agriculture’s unyielding enemies. But even the most sophisticated farmer would have trouble planning for the vagaries of today’s climate. “If I talk to a grower for five minutes, he will say what the data also show,” Jeff Hamlin told me a few days later. “These enormous changes are hard to handle.” Hamlin, who is forty, is the director of agronomic research at the Climate Corporation, which is based in San Francisco. Thin and rangy, he was dressed in khaki Dockers and a green golf shirt embroidered with a Climate Corporation logo. Two dozen men had gathered in a vast air-conditioned barn on a farm in Palmyra, about twenty miles northwest of Louisville, to hear him explain how his company plans to help them manage extreme weather. Breakfast—bacon, eggs, ham, mountains of toast, and urns of coffee—was spread on a table next to a vintage red silage chopper and a huge pile of seed. The Climate Corporation sells weather insurance, but it is an insurance company the way Google is an encyclopedia company. The mission statement, “To help all the world’s people and businesses manage and adapt to climate change,” is an explicit echo of Google’s sweeping promise to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”

If you are trying to decide whether to take an umbrella to work, the National Weather Service provides the kind of information you need. But the data, often taken from readings at local airports, are nearly useless for anyone who needs to gauge constantly changing conditions in the soil and the atmosphere. Soil type and quality can vary widely within a county, and even within a single farm field. Clay absorbs moisture far more readily than rocky soil does; the difference has profound implications for the growth of crops like corn and soybeans. Without accurate temperature and soil data, it is impossible to calculate how much moisture or sun a plant needs and how much it is likely to get.

By attempting to provide that information, the Climate Corporation hopes to transform the weather business, so long the province of guesswork and desire, into a system driven solely by numbers. And there are a lot of numbers. Company scientists process fifty terabytes of weather information every day, roughly the equivalent of a hundred thousand movies or ten million songs. The data include eight years’ worth of soil, moisture, and precipitation records for each of the twenty-nine million farm fields in the U.S. In addition, the algorithm divides the country into nearly half a million plots, then generates ten thousand daily weather scenarios for each of them. This information is used to create individualized insurance policies for corn, soybean, and wheat farmers covering major perils like drought, heat stress, and the risk of an early freeze. When data show that a field is too wet, for instance, or that hot nights will interfere with the growth of a crop, an insured farmer simply gets a check. No claims, forms, adjusters, or negotiations are required.

By pairing the tools of agronomics and climatology with the power of “big data,” the company has managed to interpret weather information more fully than any other organization. In an enormous and vulnerable market, that kind of expertise presents clear business advantages. “Major climate events are already impacting today’s business bottom lines,” Rachel Kyte, the vice-president of Sustainable Development at the World Bank, wrote recently. “There is a unique, but rapidly closing, window of opportunity to invest in resilience and achieve green and inclusive growth.” It is hard to apply statistical probabilities to individual farms or crops, and the company is too new for anyone to know if it will succeed. Nonetheless, the stakes are high enough for agriculture and the economy that many farmers are eager to try.

Recently, in addition to its insurance offerings, the Climate Corporation has taken on the potentially lucrative role of a high-tech agricultural consultant. Hamlin had come to Palmyra to demonstrate climate.com, an easily used software application that provides a hyper-local and constantly updated stream of accurate weather information. He handed out laptops and told the group to play around with the map program. “You can add whatever fields you want,” he said. “Once you tell us where your fields are, we will supply the data you need to manage them.” He mentioned that one of the company’s principal sources is Nexrad, or Next Generation Radar, a network of a hundred and fifty-nine Doppler radar stations operated by the National Weather Service. Using data from the system, the Climate Corporation creates moisture and precipitation maps so precise that in some cases a farmer can determine whether the field on one side of a road is wetter than the field on the other side. “It’s just like having your own satellite,” Hamlin told the men.

He projected a PowerPoint display onto a wall. Having chosen a field in Indiana, Hamlin walked the group through the conditions there: seventy-five degrees, partly cloudy, no rainfall in the past twenty-four hours, soil moisture in the field at sixty-nine per cent. Hamlin also noted the growth stage of the corn. “This is a snapshot of what is happening in that field right now,” he said. “In an hour, there will be a different snapshot. You can track your family fields, your neighbors’. Look in Minnesota or Iowa or Kansas, if you like. You will get a daily report for any field you choose.” The farmers started to click through yield and growth statistics about their own farms, testing the climate.com information against the facts filed in their heads.

“Damn,” Derrick Pike, a fourth-generation corn farmer, said, smacking his head with the palm of his hand. “If I had planted six days earlier, it says we would have gotten an extra three and a half bushels an acre.”

Pike’s family have been farming in Meade County, Kentucky, just across the Indiana border, since 1895. They have two thousand acres, he said. “We have one combine, and it burns a lot of fuel. If we drive all the way down to this field twenty miles away to find out it’s too wet, we lose a day. That is a huge cost in wasted time and money.” Hamlin assured him that better data could help him eliminate the guesswork. “Can it be that easy?” Pike asked, staring at a satellite photo of one of his biggest cornfields. “Are there enough numbers to predict the weather? After the last harvest, nobody would have expected this one. And next year?” He shrugged and clicked on a digital map of one of his best fields. “I wouldn’t want to bet.”

The Climate Corporation grew out of an observation made more than a decade ago by David Friedberg, the company’s thirty-three-year-old chief executive. He lived in San Francisco but commuted to Silicon Valley to work at Google, and every day he drove past a shop called the Bike Hut. “They rent bicycles to tourists,” he told me when we met at his office, not far from that shop. “But the place shut down when it was raining, and it rained all the time. I thought, What kind of business survives if its profits rely totally on how many days it rains in a month?” The answer startled him: “Seventy per cent of business is affected by the weather. If you pay attention, you read about it all the time. Box-office receipts would be way down at the movies on unseasonably warm weekends.” Because of rain, “people didn’t go to Six Flags as often as expected,” he said. “Coat sales at Nordstrom’s would be way off because it was too warm. Every day, people make crucial decisions about the weather based on presumptions and guesses and feelings. But the data exist to permit us to do better. We can simulate weather on demand. There is no reason to leave it to chance.”

In 2004, Friedberg wrote a program, along with Siraj Khaliq, a colleague at Google, that could be used to produce a rough statistical summary of local weather patterns. A person could plug in basic facts about his region and get a historical map of the climatological terrain. Friedberg began raising money, and the next year he and Khaliq decided to leave Google and start a company called WeatherBill. They changed the name to the Climate Corporation two years ago.

Friedberg was born in South Africa but grew up in Los Angeles. He went to school with Paris Hilton, Nicole Richie, and Kim Kardashian, although he didn’t have a lot in common with them. “I didn’t fit in,” he said, smiling awkwardly. When he was in ninth grade, while some of his wealthier classmates were honing their shopping skills on Rodeo Drive, he was president of the school’s Healing Our Planet Earth club. “I have always had this strong interest in unlocking the mysteries of the universe,” he said, “and it didn’t take me long to realize I wasn’t going to do that in Los Angeles.”

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Friedberg is slight and soft-spoken, and his restless blue eyes seem always to be searching for another place to be. After his junior year of high school, he spent the summer at Harvard, where he took advanced math and physics classes. Clarkson University, in northern New York, offered him a scholarship, along with the promise that he could skip the final year of high school. Friedberg, just sixteen, was delighted for a reprieve from the life of a Los Angeles teen-ager. Soon after arriving at Clarkson, he persuaded the manager of a pool hall to hire him.

“It turned out that was really the place where a bookie ran his operation for much of upstate New York,” Friedberg said. He joined a twice-weekly poker game, although he had never played before. “They would pay me in cash at the pool hall, four-twenty-five an hour. And then I would lose all the money back to them.” Eventually, the cold weather got to him. He returned to California, transferred to Berkeley, and read every book about poker strategy he could find. “I played nearly every day when I was in college,” he told me. In 2001, he graduated from Berkeley with a degree in astrophysics. (He still plays cards, and this year he spent his birthday in Las Vegas, immersed in a complicated game called Chinese poker, which involves playing three hands at once.)

As a child, Friedberg had dreamed of becoming a scientist, but in college he worked as a mathematical programmer at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. That cured him of any desire to pursue an academic career. He took his math skills to the far more financially attractive world of private equity. A year later, he moved to Google, where he became an early member of the corporate development team.

WeatherBill initially sold policies to cover nearly anything that could be disrupted by bad weather: construction projects, marketing promotions, movie shoots, concert venues, sporting events, travel plans, and agriculture. But Friedberg and Khaliq soon realized that agriculture provided a bigger market than all the other clients combined. The challenge was to make sense of the huge trove of data that had begun to accumulate, much of which was readily available from government sources, at no cost. To transform those gargantuan sets of numbers into useful and accessible agronomic models, the company assembled scores of mathematicians, software engineers, climatologists, agronomists, statisticians, and economists. Today, it has nearly two hundred employees.

From the Department of Agriculture, the Climate Corporation acquired sixty years of crop-yield statistics for every planting region in the country. It matched that information with reports from two million locations that the National Weather Service scans regularly with Doppler radar. It took so much computer power to process it all that for a while the Climate Corporation was the world’s largest consumer of one of Amazon’s Cloud services. “We would have chains of computer processors working all night, every night, just churning through data,” Brian Zimmer, the director of engineering, told me. “It was very expensive. Eventually, we learned how to run these numbers in a more cost-effective way.”

Friedberg is convinced that climate change has the potential to alter land values dramatically, and soon. “We had this economic bubble because of a major housing crisis,” he said. “Residential real-estate values dropped, and the debt-equity ratio was so high that there were massive economic consequences for the nation. There is almost certainly a much more significant devaluation that needs to occur with land affected by climate change.” In Kansas, he noted, real estate trades at prices that make sense only if a farmer gets the kind of yield on an acre of corn that is now rare. “In parts of Kansas, farmers should simply not be growing corn,” Friedberg said. “Historically, you would have a heat wave every twenty years there. Now it happens every three years or so, and in those years the crops die.”

The Climate Corporation charges roughly forty dollars an acre to insure crops, and its customers farm more than ten million acres. Many of them give little credence to terms like “climate change” and “global warming.” That doesn’t bother Friedberg. “You don’t need to talk about climate change per se,” he told me. “Statistically, you are looking at a series of numbers. If it were a roulette wheel, you could say, ‘It’s coming up black more and more frequently.’ Can I attribute that to black being overweighted by the croupier? Or to the pit boss, or the machine being broken? It doesn’t matter. Some people will argue that ice ages have waxed and waned for tens of millennia and that this is part of a natural cycle. That doesn’t change the fact that black is coming up more frequently and you will get less out of an acre of corn than you used to. The price for that land simply cannot be justified by the income it can generate.”

He went on, “It’s going to take a few climatic events in a row, I guess, and then everyone will say, ‘I’m not going to keep buying Kansas real estate at this price,’ or, ‘I’m not going to keep developing in this harbor zone in Florida.’ If you mark down all the stuff to what the discounted value should be—holy shit.” He practically shouted. “It is bad. I am convinced it is going to happen, because the math says it has to happen in at least one or two or three parts of the world. And if it happens in any of them at any point in the next ten years it will make the housing crisis look small.”

The Climate Corporation occupies a high floor in a building south of Market Street, just down the road from the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. With its Ping-Pong tables and lava lamps, the office has a giddy, post-adolescent sensibility: part rec room, part seminar space at the Institute for Advanced Study. A giant globe hangs from the ceiling, lit from above with the latest details of the world’s rapidly moving weather patterns. The day I arrived, several statistical agronomists had just begun a vigorous round of Foosball. It was lunchtime, and a few dozen people were in line for the aggressively healthy free meal that employees of West Coast tech firms have come to expect. I picked up a cranberry-flax-oatmeal cookie and a bottle of coconut water, and was led into the Ptolemy Room, one of many glass-walled conference areas, all named for famous scientists, many of whom had some theoretical connection to the work of the Climate Corporation. “One could say that Ptolemy is the first comprehensive data collector of the Common Era,” the mini-biography painted on the wall explained. “His work on a star catalogue, a planetary model, and a world map were all merges of collected data into a grand scheme.” Lengthy equations were written on blackboards, whiteboards, and glass walls. There were standing desks with treadmills, and pogo sticks and baseball gloves were scattered across the twenty-eight-thousand-square-foot space.

It is hard to say which scenario is less likely: that this place, with its brushed-concrete floors and its spare digital ethos, is the headquarters of what is essentially an agricultural insurance company or that anyone who works here has anything in common with the people who farm the millions of acres that the Climate Corporation currently insures. “I know it seems like a difficult fit, culturally, because we are, after all, the nerds that we are,” Gregory Smirin, the company’s chief operating officer, said when he stopped by the Ptolemy Room to speak with me. “It’s hard to reach out to potential customers in the Midwest and say, ‘Hello, we are calling from Nancy Pelosi’s home district, and we want to tell you about all sorts of data we have for every field on your farm.’ That was a big thing for us to crack.” Smirin has been at the company since June of 2009; in his last job, he helped tune the marriage-counselling algorithm at the matchmaking company eHarmony. He said that the Climate Corporation had slowly made inroads into the conservative strongholds of Kansas, Indiana, and Ohio by explaining to farmers how its services might help to cushion them against volatile climatic shifts.

First, the Climate Corporation had to help growers understand why they needed to think about a new kind of insurance company. Most farmers participate in the Federal Crop Insurance program, which permits them to purchase subsidized policies that cover poor yields and declines in prices. However, the government premiums usually cover about sixty per cent of the value of a grower’s crops, and in a bad year that means that a farmer can lose a lot of money. Moreover, as is often the case with American industrial agriculture, the incentives actively discourage innovation. The government calculates policy values based on a farm’s average yields during the past several years. A farmer who produces a hundred and sixty bushels of corn per acre would normally be covered for about a hundred bushels. Anyone who pushes for a higher yield—two hundred bushels, for example—and falls short risks losing nearly half his crop without any hope of reimbursement. Few farmers can afford such losses, yet under the federal program they receive no additional insurance protection when they try to increase production or make operations more efficient.

The company’s Total Weather Insurance covers crops left unprotected by Federal Crop Insurance. (In June, the Climate Corporation received approval to offer federal insurance as well.) Since 2006, the company has raised more than a hundred million dollars from Silicon Valley venture-capital funds; it is not yet profitable, but Friedberg says it is close. He regards climate.com as valuable intellectual property. So do others: last month, Monsanto, the agribusiness giant, announced that it would buy the company for close to a billion dollars. “We found that we had kindred spirits with the folks at Monsanto,” Smirin said the day the acquisition was announced. “The data science that we have developed can be applied to improve seed production immensely.” Monsanto officials say that by helping farmers track increasingly erratic weather patterns the Climate Corporation will help improve its customers’ average yields. Monsanto, often referred to as Monsatan by its many opponents, doesn’t have the kind of public image that most people at the Climate Corporation had hoped that their company would project. “My liberal vegetarian father was shocked,” Friedberg said. He eventually convinced his colleagues, and his father, that Monsanto shared the company’s vision and that the deal made sense.

Many of the Climate Corporation’s researchers have academic backgrounds, and some are quants, the not always complimentary name given to researchers who design models and assess risk. Quants are typically trained as physicists or mathematicians; during the banking crisis, they were often blamed for creating outrageous and incomprehensible schemes that hastened the recession. “We have a lot of those kinds of folks here,” Smirin told me. “They appreciate a chance to add some value to people’s lives. Many of us enjoy online gaming, social media, and playing with numbers. But there is always a choice: you could do that for Swiss Bank or you could model something that will secure the global food supply.”

Climate.com grew naturally out of the company’s basic research. Having invested so much money in building technology to generate insurance policies, the company realized that those technical capabilities might help it become even more useful as a kind of consultant. The software, which, until recently, was free, permits anyone with an Internet connection or a smartphone to study his farm fields (or any farm field, for that matter, including those of a competitor) with a specificity that five years ago would have seemed inconceivable. It’s fun to play with—SimCity for cornstalks and wheat fields. You can build farms, manipulate crops, alter harvest dates, and play out any number of horrific weather scenarios. Although nobody would describe me as a farmer, I grow a lot of vegetables in upstate New York. On November 5th, the company put East Coast farm fields online; I hope the data can help me figure out which of this year’s climatic oddities interfered so wholly with my tomatoes.

“I need it simple,” Brian Churchill said as he leaned over a monitor and scanned the cornfields of Indiana. Churchill had come to the Climate Corporation presentation in Palmyra to see if he could handle the software. “I didn’t grow up with computers.” Churchill, who is fifty-two, is the Indiana operations manager for Preferred Popcorn, one of the nation’s largest popcorn distributors. Preferred buys popcorn from farms throughout the Midwest. “It is not easy knowing when to harvest,” he said. “My boss is based in Nebraska. We ship forty semi-truckloads of popcorn a week, and he is constantly wanting to know where the corn is ready.”

As I watched, Churchill altered the planting and harvest dates to see how the program responded. Every time he adjusted a climatic variable, the cost of the policy changed, too. Growers can use the app to track soil moisture, projected yields, and historical trends. Each morning, a farmer can receive a text that lets him assess the status of his crops, how much rain the fields received the night before, and how wet the soil is. (The reports are updated every hour at a quarter past the hour.) Beginning this month, the company will charge about fifteen dollars an acre for its “pro” version, which permits farmers to continue to monitor their fields in the granular way that had been available to anyone. Basic weather information remains free.

Churchill was sold. He moved his cursor from Indiana to Missouri. “We have fields here, too,” he said. He checked the moisture levels and the estimated number of days remaining until the popcorn could be sown. “If it works, it would be worth whatever they charge,” he said.

The business model for climate.com is unusual for an insurance company, but not for an agricultural enterprise: the success of corporations such as Monsanto, John Deere, and Syngenta, whether they are selling seed, equipment, or chemicals, depends on convincing farmers that these products increase the average yield of their fields. “With climate.com, we are trying to do the same thing with software,” Smirin told me when I was in San Francisco. “We want to be able to say, ‘Here is the increased profit per acre you will experience at the end of the growing year.’ At first, people will try it on a few fields or acres. Then, if they see we have helped them, they will begin to invest more heavily.”

The data have already begun to yield disturbing information. Christopher Seifert, an agronomic researcher, told me that by 2050 wheat could be planted rarely in Kansas but widely in Alaska. “This is not so much about global warming as it is about the frequency of severe weather,” he said. “And that, in some ways, is even harder to manage.”

The company tries to factor every important climatic condition into its algorithm, including carbon-dioxide levels, ocean temperatures, and the oscillations of El Niño and La Niña. “We are not only able to say to people that they should take out a policy,” Seifert said. “Sometimes we can show them that they shouldn’t be growing corn at all. The Corn Belt is moving north, absolutely and rapidly. You can see it most clearly in North Dakota.” Richland and Cass Counties (the latter includes Fargo) used to be the only places in the state where corn grew successfully. “Now they are growing it all the way up to Manitoba,” Seifert said. “That had been canola territory, but canola has retreated even farther north. Eventually, we will hit the Canadian Shield”—a vast stretch of Precambrian rock covered by a thin layer of soil—“and that will be the end.” For the first time, farmers in North Dakota are having trouble getting their corn to market: there is just too much of it to be moved on the existing system of roads and rails.

Friedberg, whose parents raised him as a vegetarian, argues that there are many investments that make sense for the health of humans and also for the planet. He would like to open a restaurant that serves only quinoa. “The ratio of protein to energy used to produce quinoa is the highest of any food source,” he told me, and then launched into a detailed and impassioned description of how the world will feed itself in the coming decades. “You just have to do some simple math,” he said. It is a phrase he uses a lot, although his math is almost never simple. “The net energy utilization of the protein production of beef is fifty to one; for fish it’s ten to one, and for chicken it’s four to one. Soybeans are two to one—they’re pretty efficient, but quinoa is less than one and a half to one, and quinoa grows in all these drought-hardy conditions. There is all this land that’s undeveloped—in Saskatchewan, in Colorado, in large swaths of Peru—and the yield that you can start to get on quinoa if you start to invest in production would be substantial.”

If quinoa replaced meat as the principal source of protein in developing countries, “it would lower greenhouse emissions sharply,” he said. “And radically cut back on our use of water. But that is not where we are currently headed. Next year, Brazil will probably become the largest global producer of soybeans. That is a phenomenal achievement. But ask yourself what is behind that growth.”

His answer: the demands of a growing Chinese middle class. As China becomes more prosperous, it eats more meat. Last year, more than five hundred million hogs, half the world’s pigs, were slaughtered to help feed China’s population. “We need to change that or we are not going to get the eight hundred million people out of starvation that are starving right now,” he said. “Think of it: we are sending millions of tons of protein to China to feed hogs. We should really just skip the hogs and grow the quinoa.”

Although the Climate Corporation currently focusses its energies on the United States, Friedberg wants to export the template to other countries—particularly those, like India, where small increases in productivity could have an impact on millions of lives. “Whether you’re a subsistence farmer in central Africa or a major corn producer in central Illinois, you put your personal livelihood on the line every year,” he said. “It’s like rolling dice, because there is one variable nobody can control, and that’s the weather. I want to change that.”

He went on, “I could make more money building an algorithm at a hedge fund. It would be less stressful, and I could hang out in the Hamptons and other things that those people do. And then what? I would use that money to buy art and go to museum balls?”

One morning, I went to Shelbyville, southeast of Indianapolis, to hear Jeff Hamlin talk to another group of farmers, on the five-thousand-acre farm where Doug Theobald and his father, Keith, raise waxy corn. Hamlin was about to begin his presentation when an animated dark-haired woman introduced herself to me. She was Renee Theobald, Doug’s wife. “Farming these days is not for the weak-willed,” she said. “But when has it ever been easy?” The Theobalds are successful farmers, but they are better known for their skills in the world of tractor-pull competitions. Doug, a laconic and amiable man, drives a vehicle called Wicked. Renee’s truck is Pretty Wicked. They race nearly every weekend and rarely come home without at least one trophy.

The Theobalds’ combine, which cost three hundred and sixty thousand dollars, is fitted out with the latest G.P.S. units and more computer monitors than one finds in many airplanes. The farm has five full-time employees, one per thousand acres. When I asked Doug to name the most valuable skill on a modern farm, he didn’t hesitate: “I.T.”—information technology. “You need to work the Web as much as you work the fields.” At that moment, he was monitoring weather projections from climate.com on his smartphone, trying to determine whether to cancel a scheduled crop-dusting flight because of what looked like a storm coming.

Most of the farmers began setting up accounts on the laptops that Hamlin had provided. But for much of the presentation Gary Robards, a forty-two-year-old farmer, who had studied agricultural economics at Purdue, where he was in the same fraternity as Doug Theobald, stood off in a corner. “Data is fine and so is insurance,” Robards told me. “But my dad’s generation took a different approach. He would always say, ‘Don’t let anyone else take your risk for you or make your planting decisions.’ I have sort of followed that line.” Keith Theobald, Doug’s father, heard him and laughed. The senior Theobald is sixty-eight; with his perfect crewcut and his tan, weather-beaten face, he looked as if he had been typecast in the role of prosperous farmer.

“I started out in ’72,” he said. “I had no desire to buy insurance. Seemed like money burned. But a friend of my father’s said, ‘Listen, son, if you do one thing you are told to do in this lifetime, you will cover your crops.’ It’s like applying fertilizer. It’s just part of the way you farm.” He took the advice and never regretted it. “Last year was the worst I have ever seen,” he said. “But ’81, ’83, and ’88 were terrible droughts, too.” The elder Theobald reeled off weather statistics from twenty years ago as readily as a Yankees fan will recite the particulars of Mickey Mantle’s batting statistics. “A lot of the guys I started with are gone now,” he said. “They hated insurance and thought it was some kind of plot, but the bad years wiped them out. I never understood it. It’s not cheating to buy insurance. It’s a tool. Farmers have always used the tools they had at their disposal.” ♦

Michael Specter has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1998, and has written frequently about AIDS, T.B., and malaria in the developing world, as well as about agricultural biotechnology, avian influenza, the world’s diminishing freshwater resources, and synthetic biology.